Session 3: Combat from the Outbreak of Fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge to the Fall of Nanjing , July -December 1937

In his paper on the opening six months of the war for Nationalist China Professor YANG Tian-shi (Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing) chose to focus his discussion on the complex and opaque personality of Chiang Kai-shek and the dilemmas he confronted, both domestic and internal. These, he argued, are fundamental to an understanding of the strategy he pursued in the autumn of 1937, a strategy of frontal defense of Shanghai which ground down his finest German-strained divisions, to no avail. Yang argued that the strategy was based on Chiang's desperate need for foreign assistance and the need to demonstrate that Chinese determination and bravery were deserving of such assistance. Yang went on to note that, having lost so much in defense of Shanghai Chiang Kai-shek may have decided not to contest Nanjing with his remaining divisions, though his remaining in Nanjing until just before its fall makes clear his continued understanding of the value of symbolism in broadcasting China's cause to the world.

The presentation by Professor HATTORI Satoshi (Faculty of Law, Kobe University ) was concerned with the same time period, but from the Japanese side. While asserting that the Marco Polo Bridge Incident was not planned by the Chinese or the Japanese, Hattori acknowledged that the escalation of fighting after the incident was primarily due to the adamantly punitive attitude of Japanese army headquarters.

Hattori also treated the divisions of opinion within the Japanese central command, noting that one can divide Japanese strategy in the initial six month period of the war into two stages. During the first stage there were wavering disagreements between the hard-line "expansionists" in the army central command in Tokyo and the "non-expansionists" who believed that Japan should not be diverted from its preparations against the Soviet Union . That stage also included Japan 's half-hearted participation in the ultimately futile negotiations with the Nationalists that were brokered by German representatives. During the second stage, the Japanese abandoned all considerations of a negotiated settlement and determined to settle the conflict with a crushing blow that would bring about China 's surrender or collapse.

Hattori's paper also took note of structural deficiencies within the Japanese army to explain how a local skirmish outside Beijing ballooned into a full scale war at Shanghai, as well as the fact that once Japanese army operations began, they took on a momentum of their own, hardly delayed by the peace negotiations into which Japan entered without enthusiasm that autumn.

In listening to the two presentations, some western participants regretted the fact that neither paper devoted much thought or space to the actual fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge and thus did not advance a clearer understanding of the controversies surrounding that murky but deadly little firefight outside Beijing .